


The Wind From the Heights

by the_antichris



Category: Alexander Trilogy - Mary Renault
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-19
Updated: 2006-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-25 02:41:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1627199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_antichris/pseuds/the_antichris
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      Thanks to custardpringle and shihadchick for beta.<p>Written for Alexandra Lynch</p>
    </blockquote>





	The Wind From the Heights

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to custardpringle and shihadchick for beta.
> 
> Written for Alexandra Lynch

 

 

(Note: Olympias was called Myrtale before her marriage.)

* * *

There was an alcove near her mother's quarters, the relic of some long-forgotten, haphazard building project, curtained off and forgotten; when she could escape her nurses, it was the child's favourite place to play. It was seldom enough that she could escape (she was only a daughter, but Neoptolemus had as yet no sons, so her attendants were many and alert), but she was resourceful. A princess had to be. No one would give a satisfactory answer to most of her questions about being a princess, but she had a notion that princesses grew up to be queens, and that queens had something to do with ruling Epiros. And Epiros was a large country, perhaps the largest, but in any case the only one that mattered, so she had to learn. To practise.

She set her soldiers - cast-offs from her cousins, given carelessly and carefully hidden under the linens in her toy chest - in straight rows along the flagstones: Athenian hoplites straight as poplars, trousered Scythian and Persian horsemen, solid Spartan infantry. Her cloak, folded into the shape of a bolster, could be a ridge, _so_ ; a bracelet was a general's camp; her scarf was a river. She unfastened her shoulder brooch for an enemy scout, barely noticing when her chiton fell away from her shoulder. As she sent a troop of cavalry behind the scout, a draught crept dustily under the heavy curtain, bringing voices with it.

She sat back on her heels, listening. Her mother's voice, yes, that was usual, but her father had never visited when she'd been there to see.

He sounded angry.

Myrtale twitched at the curtain, pulling it back to let in a dim streak of lamplight. She slowed her breathing - quiet, she must be quiet - and peered out.

Spilled wine spread across the table, looking like blood from a scraped knee. She thought suddenly of the 'wine-dark sea' in the poetry her cousins recited, which she'd never understood. The sea she knew was sometimes the grey of stone, sometimes the blue of spring flowers. She had never seen it the colour of wine. Of blood. Today would be a grey day; the wind was blowing hard from the sea, finding its way through chinks in the palace walls and cutting through her clothes. She retrieved her cloak and breathed deeply, imagining the strange lands it came from. Imagining visiting them one day.

Her parents' voices were low, harsh, muffled. She heard her name, and her sister's, but before she could make more sense of the words, Doris scurried in to scoop up child and clothes with a soft exclamation and sweep her back to her chamber, Myrtale's scarf slithering across the floor as they went.

Doris scolded her in soft country accents ( _that's no place for a young girl, my little one, my honey_ ) as she tucked her up in bed. It was the middle of the afternoon, but bed seemed to be Doris' answer to everything. Myrtale lay quiet, meditating resentfully on the injustices of nurses and the painful mystery of parents; after a time, clutching the doll that Doris had placed under her hand, she sank into sleep.

She woke to a soft brushing against her arm. Slowly, so as not to make noise and disturb the women, she folded back her blankets to reveal an angular head, the pale brown of her sister's hair. A snake. She was supposed to be frightened, she knew, but the dry smoothness of its scales was pleasant to her hands, and the way its head rested against her breast seemed... friendly. Trusting. Its eyes were blank, black pebbles, reflecting the lamplight as tiny stars. She hissed experimentally, and it returned her greeting; she almost laughed in delight, but caught herself in time. It would never do for Doris to wake; she had shrieked fit to rouse the shades over the marten kit a cousin had brought, and could certainly not be allowed to discover a snake.

'You must go before morning,' Myrtale warned it, whispering. 'But you may come back tomorrow night. Every night.' The snake hissed agreeably.

When she closed her eyes again, it was with the snake curling around her arm like a promise. Some god must have sent it, but which? She cast about for scattered phrases from the festival hymns - not Zeus, not Apollo, not grey-eyed Athena... Dionysus. She would remember.

***

When her father died, they took her to the spreading oaks of Dodona. Her uncle wished an oracle for his reign, and he had further to consider the best disposal of his beautiful, marriageable niece. At least, Myrtale supposed she was beautiful; there were no good mirrors in her quarters, and it was hard to find a pool unstirred by the mountain breezes, and harder still to win the freedom to visit one, but the look of satisfaction on her maid's face when she dressed her spoke clearly enough. Marriageable she certainly was, and it only remained to be seen whether sending her north to the Thracians' mountain perches or south to the flat, dull plains would bring the best result.

After the dappled sunlight through the trees, the sanctuary was the soft, opaque black of the new moon. She clung to the attendant's hand for balance as her eyes supplied the missing stars, sparking points of light that left her floating, directionless.

The priestess placed a dry, cool hand on her brow and was silent a long moment. 'Open your eyes, child.' The priestess was younger than her voice, with hair the same colour as Myrtale's own. In the dark, the red was the red of the libation, flame-licked in the lamplight. The sanctuary, the attendants, her uncle beside her - everything narrowed to the golden light and the priestess' voice. 'Child,' she said again, 'the god spoke strongly for you. You will lie down with the thunder and be brought to bed of a lion.' She shook her head. 'Much more than that he would not say.'

Her uncle stirred beside her, impatient of mysteries. 'Yes, but who is she to marry?'

The priestess turned back to the altar, already forgetting them.

'The thunder, I said.'

***

When the messengers came from Macedon, Myrtale remembered the words. Broad-shouldered, black-bearded, Philip thundered - his step, his voice - as neither the polite, austere Athenians nor the winter-hardened barbarians could. Her uncle had entertained both, and she hadn't breathed freely until he'd sent them away. One moment wintry crags seemed the worst possible fate, the next the stifling propriety of Athens; she hung between them, trapped like a fly on a web.

But now the Macedonians had come. They'd already stayed longer than any other envoys; the king stayed closeted with them for hours on end and the court buzzed like an overturned hive.

In the confusion, it was easy enough to creep out through unused corridors and doorways. She felt a pang for the inattentive guards, who would certainly be executed if it was found that they'd let her pass, but dismissed it - she'd long since learned the trick of hiding her tracks, and her maids, who thought her busy in her chamber, had felt her temper too often to disturb her without cause.

The long grass behind the palace was dry and golden this late in the summer, and the sun lay heavy on her limbs. The heat pinned her down, stopped her thoughts, held her motionless, sapping her strength like unmixed wine. After some immeasurable time, she opened heavy eyes to see a snake's head against her arm - not one of her friends, with that woven pattern on its back, and this time she knew to be frightened. But the sun sapped her mind as well as her strength, leaving her contemplating the swaying head in hypnotic calmness. She thought of the Thracian's bride, slain at her wedding dance by just such a snake. There would be blood, but not much; the poison would stop the flow as it stopped her heart. Pain? Orpheus had missed his chance to ask, so the songs didn't say, but she imagined the poison running to her heart in a tide of lapping flame. The snake hissed - _so_ , she thought, neither glad nor sorry, _the end_ , but it turned with a flick of scales and moved silently off into the grass.

She watched the sun sink, doubled through her half-closed lids, then shook herself and stood. Perhaps it had already been decided, she thought, still with that odd detachment. On the whole, it was something to be glad about, she decided. Philip had looked at her at Dionysus' rites those months ago - not at her uncle's armies, but at her, at the free movement of her limbs, the loom-trained strength of her hands on the sacred serpents. There was wine and the god between them, and if he had loved her at the rites, he loved her truly. The god stripped away the layers laid down by everyday's prisoning tasks to let his worshippers see their true selves. That was his gift, what she worshipped in him, why she set him above even Zeus, and if Philip wanted what the god had shown, he was worthy of her.

He had observed the proprieties, of course, had spoken to her uncle and not her. Such was strategy. But Philip was ambitious, a campaigning king, already making war against the feuding hill tribes. He would need a queen who knew how to rule, who had the strength and desire to hold Pella for his return. Epirote women had been born to power not so many generations ago; she would learn.

The cool evening wind was sweeping down from the mountains now, smelling of flowers. She pulled her cloak over her head and went inside.

 


End file.
